----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Quest Pond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Robert Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Tom Churchill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Lee Herrington IV" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "313" <313@hyperreal.org> Sent: Friday, September 05, 2003 11:29 PM Subject: RE: (313) Excuse my ignorance... pad sounds
> its definately a tricky line , writing about techno for those who know AND > those who don't . really hard to describe sounds that are often made just > to sound unlike anything else. Synth terminology shouldn't be out-of-bounds for reviews. We write for an audience that is presumably fairly clued in. If I cite 'overcompression, 'warm pads' or 'square-wave rave tones', I think that even those who aren't producing would at least be able to associate something to the description. Some people who have never seen a sequencer know that Swedish techno invoked the world of overcompression. If you don't use these terms, there is a severe descriptive void that is otherwise very difficult to fill, so there's no communicative ground lost, even if the solution is less-than ideal. Perhaps the jargon of synth/sample terminology is a bit exclusionary, but it's not like envoking music theory, advanced production techniques or circuit jargon. These are the best terms we have to describe sounds that don't have traditional names like 'guitar', piano' or 'harp'. I don't see these descriptions as being any different, and the learning curve to acquaint yourself with these terms is pretty slim. If you want to read about techno, you shouldn't be a technophobe, which doesn't mean you need to be a technophile. At bottom, you can't separate techno criticism from technique. Other musics don't rely on technique in the same way. Tristan ======= http://www.phonopsia.co.uk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
